Books Shelf.

It was inevitable that the popular success of the "greatest generation" books about World War II would prompt a renewed interest in that war's antecedent. One of our best (and most readable) military historians, John S. D. Eisenhower, has just weighed in with Yanks: The Epic Story of the American Army in World War I (Free Press, 353 pp., $35), in which he demonstrates that the foundations of America's victory in World War II were laid when circumstances forced the creation of the modern U.S. Army in World War I.

Eisenhower's narrative explains lucidly what happened in the major battles in which U.S. troops were involved, and recounts movingly the heroism of such figures as Sergeant Alvin York. But the book includes more details of logistics and general-staff discussions than of battlefield derring-do, and is no less exciting for that-because the challenge faced by the U.S. when it entered the war in 1917 was both immense and terrifying. The American Army had just 200,000 men, and that included National Guardsmen. This force would have to be dramatically increased, and given professional training, before it could hope to make a difference on Europe's Western Front, where nearly 4 million Allied troops were facing some 2.5 million Germans.

Against the odds, and against the clock, the U.S. managed the feat. Writes Eisenhower: "A small Army, scattered about the American South and West, the Philippines, and elsewhere, expanded in nineteen months into an army of four million men, half of whom had been delivered overseas and well over a million of whom were fighting on the front lines." One consequence-German defeat-was relatively quick to arrive. "If the United States had not entered the war-or had elected not to send an expeditionary force abroad-there would never have been a Second World War; Germany would have won the first one." Another consequence was longer-lasting: The Army that was created in the crucible of the 1917-18 crisis went on to become the leading force for world peace in the 20th century.

Another new book, The First World War, Volume I: To Arms (Oxford, 1,227 pp., $39.95) by Hew Strachan, is the beginning of what promises to be a definitive history of the conflict. I say promises, because this first volume only takes us as far as the end of 1914-with the exception of Strachan's account of the war in a few theaters traditionally considered peripheral. These exceptions, however-for example, the 149- page chapter on the war in Africa-are important, because part of Strachan's purpose is to make clear that this was, in fact, a world war, and not just (as conventional wisdom would have it) a European civil war. Its status as a genuinely global conflict derives in large measure from the ambitious war aims of the Germans-which, Strachan explains, are expressed in a telling difference in terminology:

Both the British and the French official histories described [WWI] as the Great War. In English that remained the common practice until 1939; in France even today "la grande guerre" is used more frequently than "la premiere guerre mondiale." But from its outset the German official history was dubbed, simply and massively, Der Weltkrieg, "the world war." . . . It was . . . the Central Powers that broadened the war in 1914; it was not Britain but Germany that pursued a peripheral strategy and aimed to strike its opponents at their weakest points in Africa and Asia. . . . Germany agitated among the subject peoples of Britain, France, and Russia; [and] this use of revolution was not, at least in the first instance-and in some areas of the world not ever-directed at creating German global domination. The pillars of the world order were to be shaken with no idea beyond the collapse of the existing edifice.

It was, in short, the spirit of negation on a global scale. Strachan's concluding chapter on "The Ideas of 1914" depicts the habits of thought that drove Germany into war: resentment of materialism, suspicion of capitalism, contempt for Britain's race of bourgeois shopkeepers. Germany is a prosperous nation today largely because it has embraced these values its intellectual leaders so recently detested; but the ideas themselves linger, in the streets of Seattle and Genoa.

Peace, as we know, brings its own problems, and 1918: War and Peace (Overlook, 616 pp., $40), by Gregor Dallas, tells the story of the war's end in rich anecdotal detail. All the fascinating figures-Woodrow Wilson, J. M. Keynes, Herbert Hoover, Walther Rathenau-are here, along with the high politics of the making of peace at Versailles, and the low politics of the making of revolution in Berlin and Moscow.

Dallas's account of Armistice Day in London offers a wry reminder of the fallibility of historians. Dallas quotes from A. J. P. Taylor's English History, 1914-1945: "Total strangers copulated in doorways and on the pavements." Then he quotes another observer, who had been in the crowd that day: "I believe I should have noticed some of this."